He paused for a moment, then found the word.
“I would have ‘form,’” he said. “I would give you politeness. I would not say, ‘She knows me; she will understand,’ and sit with you in a back bedroom, slops about, tooth-brushes, anything. But because God understands, are we to say ‘Anything will do?’ Why, when the Queen came to Chartries we had four courses for lunch and a red carpet.”
He broke off suddenly.
“Do you understand what I mean?” he demanded of Frank.
Frank understood perfectly, for he had known a long time what Martin had only just learned,—that “form” governed his life. For he did and always had done everything he believed in as well as he could do it, lavishing thereon all the pains and trouble at his command, with the instinctive, open-handed generosity of love. These pains he did not bestow grudgingly, nor count the expenditure; whatever was worth doing was more than worth all the pains he could possibly bestow on it. That impulse lies at the root of every artistic temperament, endless trouble for ever so minute a perfection, ever so infinitesimal a finish. But Frank, like an equitable judge, had to state the other side of the case to Martin.
“What will your father say to it?” he asked, using the most commonplace phrase.
“Same as he said about you and Helen,” he remarked.
Lady Sunningdale could not help a little spurt of laughter, the repartee was so exquisitely simple. But she checked it at once.
“But it’s too awful for him,” she said. “First Helen and then you. Martin, do you think you ought——“